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375th Anniversary “Festival” of Friendship and Food

10.12.11

Preparations were under way Wednesday for Friday's celebration in Harvard Yard. Here, the view from Widener toward Memorial Church: the stand for Joanne Chang’s Harvard birthday cake, the platform where Yo-Yo Ma will perform, and the dance stage and band tent immediately in front of the church.

Photograph by Harvard Magazine/JC

A close-up of the staging for Yo-Yo Ma’s musical performance during the Friday evening anniversary celebration

Photograph by Harvard Magazine/JC

Tercentenary Theatre is being outfitted with four large LED projection screens, like this one flanking Widener Library, so guests can see the proceedings, a Harvard slide show, and—during the celebration—images of the 375th party and even, perhaps, themselves.

Photograph by Harvard Magazine/JC

Tercentenary Theatre has been wired for sound and lighting effects far beyond those accompanying the seated, daytime Commencement exercises. Expect dramatic lighting of the venue’s beautiful historic buildings, the canopy of trees, and the evening’s performers.

Photograph by Harvard Magazine/JC

Wiring and light fixtures at the base of Widener’s imposing columns

Photograph by Harvard Magazine/JC

There will be separate serving stations, like this one, for Harpoon 1636 ale and for non-alcoholic beverages, including cider made from vintage apple varieties grown in a faculty member’s orchard.

Photograph by Harvard Magazine/JC

With wet weather forecast on Wednesday and Thursday, the sound and lighting equipment is under protective covers, to be in readiness for Friday night’s festivities.

Photograph by Harvard Magazine/JC

A side view of the large dance platform constructed at the base of the Memorial Church steps. Because black light will be in use, celebrants are encouraged to dress in suitably glowing attire.

Photograph by Harvard Magazine/JC

It takes a forest of cables in a forest of trees to make a celebratory anniversary village out of Tercentenary Theatre.

Photograph by Harvard Magazine/JC

A cake platform—big enough to present and protect Joanne Chang’s 15-by-18-foot Harvard red velvet cake, suitable for dessert for you and 3,999 close friends

Photograph by Harvard Magazine/JC

The staging for those who dance

Photograph by Harvard Magazine/JC

Light stands and LED rigging at Widener’s parapet

Photograph by Harvard Magazine/JC

Under bright and sunny skies on Tuesday, October 11, Tercentenary Theatre was
a frenzy of carpenters, electricians, and riggers making ready for a Harvard
Big Event—but not the customary formalities of Commencement, with its rows of
chairs for 30,000 seated guests. Instead, the workers were constructing a huge
dance stage in front of the Memorial Church steps; completing a circular
platform where Yo-Yo Ma ’76,
D.Mus. ’91 (profiled here), will perform; securing the stand where Joanne Chang ’91
will assemble an
enormous 15-by-18-foot H-shaped red velvet (for Crimson) birthday cake;
performers’ platforms; serving stations for desserts and beverages for a crowd
of some thousands of revelers; and projection screens and lighting stands for
Harvard’s 375th anniversary celebration this Friday evening.

Come Friday, what will animate all the elaborate staging and
equipment, according to its de facto CEO, University marshal Jackie O’Neill,
is the presence of Harvard people—faculty, students, staff, alumni, parents (it
is the visiting weekend for freshman parents), members of the Governing
Boards—convening for a “family birthday party.” The celebration is heavily student-centric, in contrast to some of Harvard's more formal occasions and events; and there are plenty of party-like enticements, from food and beverages to entertainment (and even blacklights to make dancers' white shirts and suitable decorations glow in the dark of the autumn night).

To that end, three streams of community members will parade
into Tercentenary Theatre, beginning around 6:30 p.m.:

undergraduates,
following meals featuring vintage food (think autumn harvest root crops) in their Houses, and presumably showing
their House spirit and identities;

graduate and professional schools, in order
of their founding, from oldest (Medical School) to such recent newcomers as the
Graduate School of Design and Harvard Kennedy School (each celebrating its 75th
anniversary) to the Radcliffe Institute and the School of Engineering and
Applied Sciences (2007); and

alumni, who are in Cambridge for the Harvard Alumni Association fall meeting.

The first two processions are expected to be reviewed by President Drew
Faust, Faculty of Arts and Sciences dean Michael Smith, and members of the
Governing Boards as they pass Widener Library’s steps.

As they arrive, all guests will be invited to get into the
festive spirit as they meet student greeters, encounter dozens of student
performing groups, and partake
of desserts and beverages with Harvard ties, ranging from Taza chocolate
treats and an ice-cream station to the alumni-founded Harpoon Brewery’s 1636 ale
(served in the Queens Head Pub and Faculty Club on campus) to seventeenth-century
vintage apples (Roxbury Russets, Newtown Pippins, and Esopus Spitzenburgs) and
cider courtesy of the Massachusetts orchard of Eric Chivian,
director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard
Medical School.

Following those performances, Yo-Yo Ma, in the center of the
Theatre, will play a piece, and then be joined by President Drew Faust and
Harvard College dean Evelynn Hammonds for a segue to the cutting of the cake—the
prelude to an evening of dance and entertainments introduced and encouraged by
student performers, with the dancers choreographed by Jill Johnson, the new director
of dance. (That group rehearsed on Tuesday in front of the Science Center.)

Whether you are present or attending only in spirit, you can
make a contribution to the celebratory events by performing an anti-rain dance
before Friday. Just in case, O’Neill says, the University has laid in its
customary supply of plastic ponchos.